4 February 2-8, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents honor African Americans’ role in the cotton trade, it’s observed on the fourth Monday of October during the height of the cotton- picking season in Texas. In October 2022, Glover hosted an event in Elm Thicket-Northpark, just east of Love Field, for African American Cot- ton Pickers Day in collaboration with the city of Dallas. About a dozen people turned out to a small room at the K.B. Polk Recreation Center to learn from Glover and discuss the historical significance of the cotton trade in the city. Glover passed out copies of Jim Schutze’s book The Accommodation and asked every- one to turn to Chapter 3. He read the open- ing paragraphs, which detail the first in a series of bombings of Black homes in South Dallas. One of the homes was owned by a man named Horace Bonner. As the book explains, the white working class and middle class didn’t like the idea of people like Bonner having enough money to buy houses in their neighborhood. Accord- ing to the book, this intolerance led to the bombings. The Bonner name is an important one in the history of Dallas’ cotton trade, Glover said. Anderson Bonner, Horace’s grandfather, was an enslaved African man who worked the plantations. After he was emancipated he was able to acquire 25 acres of land in Dallas, and his farm eventually grew to 2,000 acres, some of which was used to grow cotton. Glover suggested that Horace Bonner had the means to buy the house that was bombed at least in part because of the money his fam- ily had generated from cotton. Glover then introduced the small audi- ence to Walter Bonner, Anderson Bonner’s great grandson. Walter Bonner, 78, said when his great grandfather was freed from slavery, he had many skills he used to make money and buy land. Eventually, people from all over North Texas were picking Anderson Bonner’s cot- ton, Walter Bonner said. “They’d take it to the gin and make money. He said: “Believe me, cotton built this city. If there hadn’t been cotton, there wouldn’t be a Dallas.” This is the message Glover has been try- ing to get out for years. To illustrate this, he took us around one day to see remnants of the cotton trade scattered throughout North Texas. One of the first places Glover wanted to go to was the home of William Cochran, the man often credited for bringing cotton and wheat farming to what later became Dallas. We met at Glover’s house in the Elm Thicket-Northpark neighborhood in early December. Glover was wearing a traditional sack used for storing cotton as it was picked in the fields. Inside the faded white sack were clumps of hand picked cotton. His neighbor- hood is part of Dallas’ cotton story too, he said. In the 1860s, emancipated African Amer- icans in Texas began moving throughout the state. Some of these freed men and women created their own communities in and around Dallas. These freedman towns in- cluded Joppa, Tenth Street, and Elm Thicket-NorthPark. Many of those men and women likely worked on cotton plantations when they were enslaved and would con- tinue to do so in the following years as sharecroppers. Elm Thicket-NorthPark was a mostly Black neighborhood when Glover moved in over four decades ago. More white people have moved there in recent years, some into new houses that tower over the small single-family homes like Glover’s that used to make up most of the neighborhood. Some of Glover’s white neighbors walked past his house as he demonstrated how slave owners would whip their slaves. Wielding a leather whip, Glover waved his arm in front of him and flicked his wrist. The whip shot out several feet in front of him and made a menacing crack that echoed throughout the neighborhood. As neighbor passed by walking a dog. Glover smiled and waved before we headed to the home of William Cochran. The Peters Colony was formed in 1841, bringing people like William Cochran to North Texas. Stephen F. Austin, the “father of Texas,” led people like Cochran to colo- nize the area. Around the time his family got the Texas land, Austin noted the importance of the cotton trade and how it would only be profitable through slavery. According to the Texas State Historical Association, Austin wrote in 1824, “The principal product that will elevate us from poverty is cotton and we cannot do this without the help of slaves.” Cochran moved his family to North Texas after seeing a sample of soil from the area. The family was given a land certifi- cate in the Peters Colony in March 1843. The city of Dallas had just been established two years earlier and Dallas County would be established in 1886. Cochran was elected as the first Dallas County clerk. He later became the first to represent Dallas County in the state legislature. He estab- lished a farm where he grew wheat and cotton, as well as fruits and vegetables. The family would later build a corn and cotton mill on their land. The Cochrans also had a cotton planta- tion on land that became Dallas Love Field. Glover said the cotton picked at this planta- tion would be processed in the Cochran family’s gin. The U.S. Army purchased 670 acres of this land and turned it into a flight training base to prepare pilots for World War I. The Army stopped using the facility in 1919 and the land was then leased back to the city and turned into Love Field. The family’s home still stands today and is a Texas Historical Landmark. The next stop was Anderson Bonner Park. Anderson Bonner and his family were some of the few Black people who were able to benefit from this booming industry at the time. Dallas dedicated a park west of Medi- cal City Hospital to Anderson Bonner, nam- ing it after him in 1976. Last year, a sculpture was placed in the park to honor him. The sculpture is called “Sankofa” and it was created by an artist named Andrew Scott. On his website, Scott explains that Sankofa is a word in the Twi language of Ghana that means “go back and fetch it.” Glover interprets like this: “You must know where you come from to know where you’re going.” The sculpture, called “Sankofa,” was created by the artist Andrew Scott. On his website, Scott explains that Sankofa is a word in the Twi language of Ghana that means “go back and fetch it.” Glover interprets it like this: “You must know where you come from to know where you’re going.” The sculpture depicts a bird holding down an egg on its back with its beak. In the center of the bird’s body is a sculpted portrait of Anderson Bonner with a brief biography on the other side. It’s written in first person, explaining how Anderson Bonner and his brother were listed on an inventory of property by their slaveholder Willis Bonner. They were living in Alabama at the time. When Willis Bonner died, his wife moved to Dallas, bringing with her Anderson Bonner and his brother Lewis Bonner. The two were emancipated in 1865. A few years later, they registered to vote in Dallas County’s Precinct 5. The biography on the sculpture doesn’t note that Anderson amassed 2,000 acres, an omission that Glover said diminishes his ac- complishments. Now, Medical City Hospital sits on some of the land he owned and Central Express- way cuts right throughout. Glover said he’s advocated for a cultural center to be built along Central Expressway in honor of An- derson Bonner. “Central runs through his land,” Glover said. “I’ve told the family, I’ve told the city, we should have the Anderson Bonner Center on the expressway, a cultural center with his history and life.” We drove through Deep Ellum to our next stop, the Continental Gin Building. Before U.S. inventor Eli Whitney pat- ented the cotton gin, Glover said enslaved African people handpicked the cotton and separated it from its seeds. “It took all day. It was laborious,” Glover said. “Once the cot- ton gin was invented, it made it far easier to separate the seeds, so you didn’t need peo- ple doing that job any more. So, you put those people over there picking more cotton while the gin separated the seeds.” This increased the volume of cotton picked and processed. When a man named Robert S. Munger moved to Dallas around 1885, he brought with him something he’d been calling his improved cotton gin. Three years later, he started the Munger Improved Cotton Ma- chine Co. “That revolutionized the gin mak- ing process, the machines that separate the cotton,” Glover said. “The railroads would come in there, take those gins out” and ship the machines elsewhere. Munger built a cotton gin factory on Elm Street that is now known as the Continental Gin Building. Just down Elm Street was the Southern Rock Island Plow Co. building where the plows needed to grow the cotton were manufactured. The building was later turned into the Texas School Book Deposi- tory, which is now the home of the Sixth Floor Museum “On one end you had the plow company, on the other end you had the gin company,” Glover said. “Elm Street became an indus- trial cotton mecca for America.” The Dallas Cotton Exchange was downtown. It was the largest inland cotton exchange in the coun- try and made Dallas a hub for the booming cotton industry. Author Sven Beckert argues in his book Empire of Cotton: A Global History that all of this action in the cotton industry helped shape global capitalism during the Indus- trial Revolution, more so than steam or steel. This industry allowed white people to accumulate generational wealth while Black people were stuck in a loop of generational labor from which they’d never see the full benefit, Glover said. After hours of driving around Dallas, ex- plaining to a young, white reporter the ex- tent to which cotton is interwoven in the city’s history and the plight of the people who picked it, Glover walked into the Conti- nental Gin Building. What was once the largest manufacturer of cotton gins in the world is now a retail and office space with a small coffee shop. Still wearing a traditional cotton sack, Glover walked up to the register at the coffee shop to order a hot chocolate and a cookie. He saw a piece of merchandise the shop was selling that said, “Don’t be a cotton-headed ninny muggins.” He was a little offended, but he laughed it off and asked the barista what it was supposed to mean. She laughed nervously, saying she didn’t know and that she only worked there. It seemed to be a reference Jacob Vaughn Now a retail and office space, the Continental Gin Building once held a factory making cotton gins. Unfair Park from p3 >>p6
